Still Breathing.

Tag

anxiety

To those who follow and read my posts, I apologize for being gone so long. Life took a moment to pick me up and shake me around, and everything has been hectic. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure I was going to come back at all. I hit a low and didn’t have the energy to even get out of bed. I won’t really be going into extreme detail, but I will explain a bit.

First and foremost, my depression whipped around and hit me with ferocity. There was no specific reason, it just came back. I had convinced myself a long time ago that I had control over it, not the other way around. It seems I was very, very wrong. If you’ve ever dealt with depression or anxiety, you know how suffocating it can be at times.

Of course, this would be the time for everything to start inexplicably falling apart, right? My employers began cutting my hours down to nothing due to a mandatory pay raise over the whole company. I was barely able to pay my rent, let alone other bills. By the end of it, I was hardly scheduled at all. I mostly just came in to “help out a bit.” As I’ve mentioned before, the job market around here is terrible, and I was stuck between jobs for almost a month. We got behind on all our payments, and the stress level has risen to the max.

BUT.

We’re making it. I found a new job. I have to bust my ass to make up for the lost time, but I’m okay with that. To survive, you do what you have to. Above all else, we tell ourselves it will be alright, because it will eventually. Penny scraping doesn’t last forever. One day we’ll get a good night’s rest. Most importantly, our son has his whole life ahead of him. If everything we do, we do for him, and we do it as a team, then it will inevitably be alright. And that’s what really matters.

I finally opened my email today and saw I had a bunch of messages asking me to keep writing (along with my husband also telling me to), and it gave me that boost of encouragement I needed to get back on here. So thank you guys.

Shortly before I went on my little “vacation,” I had also started up a YouTube channel. I managed to get a couple videos up before I ran into “technical difficulties” (i.e. I had to sell my camera…). I will be trying to post more, though, once I get my other camera situated. The channel will be a bit different from what I post on here. A bit less dark, mostly.

As a teenager, I didn’t sleep. I was too afraid to sleep. I couldn’t sit in the dark alone. I couldn’t sit in the silence of night. Some nights, I just sat in the center of my bed and rocked back and forth in a pathetic attempt to calm myself. Sometimes I would cry. Most of the time, though, I just sat, silent and rocking.

The paranoia started in my mid-teens, but the insomnia took hold of me much earlier. Around the time I was three years old, the night-terrors began. Livid and suffocating night-terrors. To coincide with this, of course, I also had a sleepwalking problem. Practically every night, I would physically act out whatever I was dreaming. Especially the night-terrors. I’d scream, run through the house, try to get out the door, and even sit and cry. I’d frighten my family and friends. Luckily for my parents (as well as my friends’ parents), I couldn’t undo a lock in my sleep.

It’s unnerving, though. I could recite the details of nearly all my worst nightmares, but I couldn’t tell you what my last pleasant dream was about. What is the psychology behind that? Or maybe the question is in the science of it. Did something in my childhood disturb me to the point of these habits being instilled in me? Or is it some sort of imbalance in my brain? I honestly couldn’t tell you. It seems like I’ve just always been this way.

I still feel this way today. Not as severely as I used to, of course, but the anxiety is still there. The fan has to be on for me to be able to fall asleep. I can’t sleep alone; my husband has to be in the bed with me. Even then, it can take me hours to fall asleep.

It makes me feel…broken. Like there’s something wrong with me. A grown woman shouldn’t be afraid of the dark.